Archive for month: April, 2026
The following is an excerpt from an article published recently by the Union of Concerned Scientists and written by Edwyn Lyman, Director, Nuclear Power Safety.
April 26, 2026 marks the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl Unit 4 nuclear power plant disaster in the former Soviet Union. A toxic combination of defective reactor design, deficient safety analysis, disregard for operating procedures and administrative controls, prioritization of power production over safety, lack of independent regulatory oversight —and, above all, excessive secrecy—led to the worst nuclear reactor accident in history.
Operators botched a safety test and took the reactor into an unstable state, causing a rapid rise in power that triggered violent steam explosions that blew apart the reactor core and surrounding structures. Fires burned for days. A massive amount of radioactivity dispersed across the former Soviet Union and much of Europe. Hundreds of thousands of individuals were evacuated or relocated from contaminated areas, and a 30-kilometer radius “exclusion zone” was established that is still in place today. Dozens of emergency personnel died within weeks from acute radiation syndrome, and thousands of children developed thyroid cancer from radioactive iodine exposure. Ultimately, tens of thousands of cancer cases throughout Europe are projected to occur from the radioactive pollution caused by the disaster.
The United States and many other countries have sought to distance themselves from the potential for a Chernobyl-like accident by asserting that their nuclear regulators would never have licensed a reactor with the safety flaws of the RBMK (a Russian acronym for “high-power channel-type reactor,” the Chernobyl-4 design), and that light-water reactors (LWRs), by far the most common type of power reactor in operation, are far safer. While this argument has some validity, soon after the accident it became clear the safety benefits of LWRs compared to the Chernobyl-4 RBMK were not as great as advertised—a point later illustrated by the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi triple LWR meltdown in Japan. And today, many of the regulatory requirements and standards that underlie this confidence in the safety of the US nuclear fleet are being thrown by the wayside as the Trump administration recklessly pushes to “unleash” nuclear energy as quickly as possible.
Read the full article here.
By Sharon Squassoni
President Donald J. Trump’s recent threats to end civilization in Iran gave many a nuclear weapons expert the jitters. For them, existential threats mean only one thing: use of nuclear weapons. Thankfully, Trump’s April 7, 2026 threats were empty and possibly just a ruse to create a dramatic background for the temporary ceasefire in Iran. To be clear, the use of nuclear weapons in combat would serve no earthly strategic or tactical purpose, but threats to use them can be potent: even a latent capability in the hands of Iran was regarded as too threatening for the United States to tolerate any longer, which reportedly drove the U.S. and Israeli military actions.
It’s hard to tell who’s winning or losing in this conflict, but already it’s clear that disruption of energy sources (Iran’s blocking the Straits of Hormuz and the U.S. and Israel striking Iran’s oil infrastructure) focuses attention like no other infrastructure attack. A sudden cutoff that shrinks supplies and distorts prices echoes in economies across the globe. This is one reason the world was hesitant to impose sanctions on Iran’s oil some twenty years ago when Iran’s clandestine nuclear program was first unveiled. Today, the Iran war has underscored just how dependent the world continues to be on foreign sources of oil.
Would nuclear energy be any different?
Since 2022, there has been a push in Europe and elsewhere to deploy nuclear reactors to reduce dependencies on Russian oil and gas, triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But such a response is almost laughable to anyone paying attention to what has transpired in Ukraine in the last four years. Russia hesitated not at all to hold the Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhiya nuclear power plants hostage, in addition to firing upon them. The only thing that has saved Ukraine from a major nuclear meltdown is the fact that Russia wants to save Ukraine for itself, rather than destroy it utterly. Such vulnerability works both ways: in August 2025, an auxiliary transformer at Russia’s Kursk nuclear power plant (the largest in Russia) caught fire after Russian forces shot down Ukrainian drones.
For those who still believe in international laws, there are rules to prevent attacks on nuclear plants — specifically the Protocol I Additional to the Geneva Conventions, a key document in international humanitarian law adopted in 1979 — that 175 countries follow. Unfortunately, Russia withdrew in 2019 and the US has never ratified Protocol I (along with Israel, India, Pakistan, Turkey and Iran). The Protocol protects “works and installations containing dangerous forces,” prohibiting attacks on nuclear power plants that generate civilian electricity, among other things. It concedes that some nuclear power plants that regularly support military purposes may be attacked. For those paying attention to nuclear development trends, this should be worrisome because both China and the United States have programs to develop nuclear reactors for specific military uses. Not content to learn from past experience, the United States plans to deploy a military microreactor by July 4th of this year. Leaving aside questions of cost, safety and peacetime security, such deployments will widen the base of deadly targets in war. Civilians won’t care whether international law deems these “legitimate” targets of attack.
Attacks on nuclear facilities themselves are not new. The United States, Russia, Israel, Iran and Iraq have all, at times, targeted nuclear research and power reactors under various stages of construction and operation in the past. Sometimes these attacks tried to slow nuclear weapons proliferation programs and sometimes, as in the Iran-Iraq war, they were targeted for less specific purposes. After the June 2025 attacks on uranium enrichment-related facilities by the United States, touted as “obliterating” Iran’s nuclear program, International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Grossi warned that a strike on the Bushehr power plant could cause a regional catastrophe.
Recently, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has claimed that the Bushehr plant, which generates close to 1000 Megawatts of electricity, has been struck four times since February this year. The closest hit has been 75 meters from the plant on April 4, killing a security guard and damaging a building. Russia, which has 128 Rosatom personnel at the plant, is considering further evacuations, which sounds eerily similar to what happened to the Zaporizhzhia plant in March 2022.
To create a nuclear disaster, it’s not necessary to directly hit the containment building. Damaging on-site and off-site power necessary for cooling can also have severe repercussions. In the case of Zaporizhzhia, operators shut down reactors to minimize some of the risks. But even reactors in stand-by modes pose radioactive risks in a war zone. The Bushehr power plant is still operating and has spent nuclear fuel on-site in spent fuel pools. Who can forget the video footage of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2011 when crews attempted to spray seawater from helicopters on spent fuel pools damaged by the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan? More than a decade later, the site is still undergoing remediation.
In spite of all this, Director General of the IAEA Grossi promotes rules of the road to help nuclear energy continue operating in warzones. It is a stark reminder that the IAEA’s major mission is to promote nuclear energy, despite the emerging lessons from two “nuclearized” wars.
In fact, learning the wrong lessons from this conflict could carry the seeds of unimaginable future disruption. A world that fears reliance on foreign energy could rely even more on nuclear energy for not just electricity, but transportation and data processing, the new currency of power. The greater the reliance, the keener officials will be to keep it up and running. More and more widely distributed nuclear targets will not be protected by Protocol I of the Geneva Convention, or by the International Atomic Energy Agency. There is no International Nuclear Red Cross or Emergency Management Agency.
Many Americans find it hard to contemplate attacks on U.S. soil, with good reason. This is why the 9/11 attacks affected the population so deeply. Those attacks sparked significant improvements in security at nuclear power plants that are now being unraveled by a push to deploy nuclear reactors in the United States as quickly as possible. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently voted to discontinue force-on-force commando drills designed to reveal weaknesses in site vulnerabilities. A victim of the DOGE process, the NRC has been stripped of its independence and will now overhaul the entire licensing process, even as the Trump administration seeks to end-run the NRC by deploying new reactors on government sites owned by the Departments of Energy and Defense.
If anything, the Iran war demonstrates Gulliver’s dilemma. Both Ukraine and Iran have used drones successfully to compensate for conventional force inferiority. Are we truly prepared to counter cheaper and more plentiful attacks that are more difficult to detect and defend against?
Iran’s nuclear program was feared for its potential to provide the basis for nuclear weapons. Now it is generating fear for its potential to provoke a more imminent regional catastrophe, whether intended or accidental. These security risks, perhaps not widely appreciated now, will only grow in a more nuclearized future.
Sharon Squassoni
Research Professor
Elliott School of International Affairs,
The George Washington University
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